Re: Master Rotoscoping With SilhouetteFX
Chrystal Dueno
Before computers became widely available, roto-scoping machines required very little technical knowledge from an animator. All they needed to do was change camera angles incrementally and draw new lines in between each frame until their character had been animated completely. However, with technological advances, dependency on rotoscope machines grew lesser.
In visual effects, the same process applies differently. The rotoscoping artist (or roto artist for short) traces an object using a set of tools within the compositing software to create a new alpha channel for a specific part of an image sequence or video. Once the matte or alpha channel is in place, it can extract the particular element of the shot and place it on a different background or change its color or anything else desired.
Rotoscoping can take hours or even days to complete. It ultimately depends on the complexity of the shot and the scope of the work. The use of Blue Screen and Green Screen speeds up this process of Matte Creation but is not feasible for every attempt. So Rotoscoping still plays a vital role in a VFX pipeline.
Many types of compositing software can be used for VFX Rotoscoping. But not all of them have robust roto spline tools packaged with them. There are only a few which does that. Notable ones are Nuke and Fusion.
Mocha Pro is an award-winning software for Planar Tracking. But its Rotoscoping tools are equally powerful and are used in VFX pipelines of studios across the world. Apart from this, Mocha Pro is also capable of object removal, camera stabilization and also is packed with Stereoscopic workflow capabilities. Below is a quick tutorial to get you started in Mocha Pro
Rotoscoping is a technique used in visual effects and animation industries to manually trace over live-action footageframe by frame in order to create a matte or mask. This matte or mask can be used to separate the subject of thefootage from its background or to apply different visual effects to specific parts of the scene.
Silhouette is a software application designed specifically for rotoscoping, compositing, and visual effects. It offers a range of features and tools that help artists to create high-quality mattes and masks with greater precision and efficiency. The Master Rotoscoping with Silhouette tutorial course is designed to teach artists how to use Silhouette effectively to achieve better results in their rotoscoping work.
Whether or not rotoscoping is essential for all types of visual effects work depends on the specific project and the techniques being used. However, it is a widely used technique in the industry and is often necessary for achieving certain effects or for integrating live-action footage with computer-generated imagery.
Silhouette has been deeply entrenched in paint for post-production for many years. Auto Paint, new in V5, is a breakthrough innovation providing the speed and detail of raster-based paint systems with the repeatability and animation capability of vector-based paint systems.
Never before have the benefits of raster-based and vector-based paint been combined as seamlessly as in Silhouette V5. The raster-based nature of each stroke is logged into a database, available to be instantly played back using keyframes or trackers in a manner similar to vector-based paint systems. Visual effects artists finally get a lightning-fast raster paint system that can automatically tween or repaint over modified footage.
Jeremy Cho, rotoscoping and paint supervisor on Ted, says of Silhouette V5 and Auto Paint "T he new Silhouette offers enhanced features and tools to tackle complex rotoscoping and painting tasks with greater efficiency. When it comes to frame-by-frame painting, the best of both worlds combine within this package: the speed of rasterization and the flexibility of non-destructive painting. Silhouette is a vital rotoscoping and paint tool here at Tippett Studio."
Silhouette was the first roto and paint system to offer a full stereo workflow. More recently, Silhouette has become an important part of the 2D to 3D conversion process. New in V5 is the optional S3D node incorporating RealityTools technology from 3D Impact Media, a new strategic partner.
Silhouette partner Perry Kivolowitz received an Academy Award for Scientific and Technical Achievement in 1996 for the co-invention of shape-driven warping and morphing. Sixteen years later Silhouette introduces a re-imagining of shape-based warping. Extremely fast, the Silhouette Morph node is capable of producing film resolution warps in a few milliseconds (in its draft mode). Performance remains high even as warps become more complex. On a shape by shape basis, warps can be exact (where controlled pixels hit their marks precisely) or may be of looser precision (shapes become permeable). The Silhouette warper provides control over image folding, a feature overlooked in many warping systems.
In addition to these major advances, Silhouette V5 adds numerous features and changes such as automatic stereo alignment, depth channel support, local disk caching for speedy playback, filled shapes, object searching, source transformations, an improved and more accurate planar tracker, and the ability to rotate the viewer for upside down and sideways shots
Silhouette steps far beyond rotoscoping as a fully featured compositing system. This training course aims to get you working fast with the new node-based system, in a way that builds your skills and confidence with the expanded toolset.
The 12 hour course is structured so that core ideas are introduced early, in a straightforward way, then built upon to show more in-depth and specialised tasks. Tasks are practical jobs and course footage is provided for you to follow along at your own pace.
Click here for a full course overview.
The UI is significantly updated in Silhouette, and offers even more opportunities for working faster and more efficiently. This section gets you acquainted with the basic tasks when you start a project, importing footage, working on a task and exporting. This also covers more in-depth viewer options, mixing footage resolutions and setting up project preferences.
Mastering motion tracking will save hours of manual animation. This section shows how to use the three different motion trackers available in Silhouette, and some of the different tasks we can use them for. It also discusses what to do when things go wrong with a tracker and techniques to fix it.
The strategies you use to tackle a complex rotoscoping task have a huge impact on the time a task takes. In this section we look at a tricky organic roto job, and break down the stages in animation. You will learn about the importance of object management, hierarchy and how the IK Tool (Inverse Kinematics) can make a lot of complex animation really easy.
After a quick overview of the various paint tools and brushes, we move in to a common dust-busting job to clean up a highly reflective, but also scratched, surface. After creating a good-looking single frame, we will use our motion tracking skills and Auto Paint to make quick work of the rest of the clip.
The Morph node is extremely powerful, and we take a structured look at how to use it. We build up from the basic ideas behind warping, to dealing with folding and other potential issues. Our final project is doing a morph transition between two moving pieces of footage and the tactics to deal with that.
Output
What do you do when you have finished the job? Outputting can be as simple as exported your rotosplines out to another application, exporting your final composite, or taking out multi-part files for further manipulation. We look at these and other output features.
We take the strategies we have learned in previous sections, put them all together and expand on them, whilst exploring more of the 138 built-in nodes contained in Silhouette. We also compare and contrast two different compositing strategies for dealing with compositing steam, smoke and fire.
The planar tracker received significant improvements in Version 7. This section goes in to depth about different techniques for getting the best results out of this powerful tool. We look at why tracks might fail and how to tweak the settings to achieve a good track. We also look at using that tracking data for different tasks, including the new stabilization workflow available in v7.
The fourth part of this exercise explores featureless tracking and how to track an object that has no obvious tracking areas. This is a systematic look at why other techniques might fail and what a better strategy looks like.
Another new feature in v7 to do warping without have to create splines. In this exercise we do some face reshaping, and see how to make it extreme yet believable. The second part sees how to apply these changes to a moving object and how to disguise the transition from unwarped to warped.
The second half of the exercise adds in more Paint, before deciding how to break up our shapes to create hold-in and hold-out masks. We also use some more of the new roto tools including the Extract Shape.
The job behind this exercise is a straightforward sky replacement but we touch on all the core compositing skills to achieve this; tracking, rotoscoping, keying, paint and finishing effects. The idea is to see how all these sections fit together in a wider workflow and how important tidy thinking is. New in version 7 is the ability to group and ungroup nodes and this plays in to our tidy thinking strategy.
This exercise also spends time on the Cutout Brush for a quick spot of matte painting, and why setting up your paint channels is a good plan when compositing! We also take a look at the new Lens Flare node and how we can use this effect in different ways.
Ben Brownlee has worked in production and post-production in various roles since 1999. He has been involved in a wide variety of films, television and TV commercial projects in that time. As a trainer, he has worked with some of the leading broadcasters and post-houses, providing bespoke courses across the globe.
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